coondoggie writes "NASA and its Applied Sciences Program will be using 14 satellites to watch the Earth's environment and help predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world. Through orbiting satellites, data is collected daily to monitor environmental changes. That information is then passed on to agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense who then apply the data to predict and track disease outbreaks and assist in making public health policy decisions. The use of remote sensing technology helps scientists predict the outbreak of some of the most common and deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been a little over a year since AOL made the big decision to go free. It was about the only thing the company could do at the time. It's subscriptions were dropping rapidly. It held little to differentiate itself from the many free services out there. It had failed to build a real broadband strategy for years. The problem, though, was that the decision to go free was made way too late and, most importantly, without much additional strategy behind it. It seemed like the strategy was basically just "if we go free, we'll sell ads." They left out the important middle step though: the company needed to actually give people a reason to visit and give advertisers a reason to buy ads. Without that step, it really isn't surprising that the company is realizing its "free, with ads" strategy isn't working as well as planned. On the same day that AOL officially bought another online ad company, it was revealed that the growth in ad revenue has been slowing, and it lost a big advertising partner. This is a good reminder, though, for other companies out there who are trying to figure out how to embrace "free" as a part of their business model. You can't really neglect the rest of your business model.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Hugh Pickens writes "People deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our "moral integrity" and protect our "self-concept" and feeling of "global self-worth." Now experimenters at Yale have demonstrated that other primates employ the same psychological mechanism. In one experiment, a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M's and was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue. Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. "We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For many years, states have been trying to tax VoIP providers as if they were telcos. From the states' perspective, they were using a "quacks like a duck" test, whereby any phone service that acted like a traditional phone service should get taxed like a traditional phone service. Since states rely on tax dollars so much, this feeling was reinforced as people started ditching landline phone service for VoIP providers. However, there are a few problems with this. The reason that telcos are taxed is because of the structure of the telephone system, and the fact that the government more or less handed over rights of way and control of the system to private companies. VoIP providers, however, have the calls travel over the internet, changing the nature of the equation, and meaning that most of the reasons for taxing telcos shouldn't apply. Shouldn't, except for politicians who can't see beyond the money. Yet, taxing VoIP is a doubly bad idea, because VoIP is still an emerging service that is rapidly changing -- offering new services and opportunities that weren't possible on landline offerings. Putting a tax on it could kill a lot of that innovation. Too many states don't see that.

Jeff Pulver is showing the contrast between two states in dealing with VoIP regulatory issues. New Jersey has passed a law saying that it will not regulate VoIP, noting "The proliferation of new technologies and applications and the growth in the number of providers developing and offering innovative services using Internet Protocol is due in large part to a light regulatory touch, including freedom from traditional telephone regulation that these new technologies and services and the companies that offer them have enjoyed in New Jersey.... These economic benefits, including consumer choice, new jobs, and significant capital investment, will be jeopardized and competition minimized by the imposition of traditional State entry and rate regulation on Voice over Internet Protocol service and Internet protocol-enabled service."

Unfortunately, Missouri isn't quite so enlightened. Despite various rulings saying that VoIP should not be taxed, Missouri is trying to bend the rules to make at least some VoIP offerings (mainly those provided by cable companies) classified as telco services that need to be taxed. As Jeff notes, if this works, then expect other states to follow suit and create loopholes for taxing VoIP providers... and then watch as all VoIP related innovation happens elsewhere.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Stony Stevenson writes "Canadian researchers have promised to squeeze "decades" of cancer research into just two years by harnessing the power of a global PC grid. The scientists are the first from Canada to use IBM's World Community Grid network of PCs and laptops with the power equivalent to one of the globe's top five fastest supercomputers. The team will use the grid to analyze the results of experiments on proteins using data collected by scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, New York. The researchers estimate that this analysis would take conventional computer systems 162 years to complete."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sad to say, my queue at Netflix is empty.

Okay, so you've been reading this blog for years, you know what movies I liked, probably don't have much insight into movies I don't (hint: I like most movies).

And now that we have easy comments (thanks to Disqus), it's easy for you all to tell me what your favorite movies are.

I just watched The Clinton Years, a Frontline documentary produced in conjunction with ABC News Nightline in 2001. It's good time to review the eight years of Clinton's presidency, because the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, was very much a part of that bit of history.

If find after having watched it that my impression of Mrs Clinton is quite different. How so? Hasn't really settled in yet.

The show is very well produced, with interviews of many Clinton staffers, and it shows the repeating cycle of Clinton's political and personal life. How would it be different with Hillary as President? That's a question we're clearly going to be deciding, very soon.

The PBS website for the program.

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danny sez, "Mark Klein, the whistleblower at the heart of EFF's case against AT&T over their complicity in the warrantless wiretapping of their users, went to Washington this week. He's explaining to Congressfolk and journalists there exactly what AT&T is doing, why it's blatantly illegal, and why Congress shouldn't give them retroactive immunity for their crimes. Senator Chris Dodd's staff edited together a two minute YouTube interview with Klein. It lays out pretty effectively what's at stake here." Link (Thanks, Danny!)

The 40th Anniversary ish of Rolling Stone contains an excellent interview with William Gibson, conducted by Salon's Andrew Leonard.

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi...

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity's future was that it wasn't going to have one at all. We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: "Hey, look — you do have a future. It's kind of harsh, but here it is." I wasn't going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Link

See also:
William Gibson's Spook Country
Original proposal for William Gibson's Spook Country
William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present

As many companies would still like to believe that an IP address is all you need to identify a person using a computer, it's worth remembering that not only does an IP address not definitively identify who was using a computer, but it can easily get mixed up. A year ago, we had the story of someone whose house got incorrectly raided (by Shaquille O'Neal, for some unexplained reason) for child porn after an ISP gave investigators the wrong IP address info. It sounds like something similar has happened in India, where a man spent 50 days in prison for posting insulting pictures to Orkut. The only problem was that the guy had nothing to do with it. His ISP handed over the wrong information. This was only discovered once police found and arrested the people who actually uploaded the image. We won't even get into the question of why people are being arrested for uploading insulting photos, but this should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks that relying on an IP address as the sole piece of evidence is reasonable.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) yesterday successfully moved articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney to the House Judiciary committee. 'Today's resolution from Kucinich (D-Ohio) was essentially the same as the legislation he introduced earlier this year, which included three articles of impeachment against Cheney based largely on allegations that he manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. The last article accuses Cheney of threatening "aggression" against Iran "absent any real threat."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes to mention that hardware hacking enthusiasts can now get their hands on the guts of the Everex TC2502 Linux PC for just $60 (USD). The compact x86-compatible "gOS Dev Board" offers a lightweight Linux-based OS designed for use with Google Apps. " Along with a Firefox browser supporting the Google toolbar, gOS includes local productivity applications, such as OpenOffice.org. However, its main goal is "coherently packaging Google Apps to give users the idea that they can use Google as their main environment," explained Paul Kim, of Everex. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday Facebook announced its long-awaited advertising program. This was inevitable: if you're going to justify a valuation just shy of Iceland's GDP, you've got to eventually propose a means of generating revenue. Facebook will no doubt earn quite a bit of money at the ad game. But the initiatives disclosed yesterday are likely to be a mixed bag — and not at all as innovative as founder Mark Zuckerberg would have you to believe.

The most straightforward of the new offerings is Facebook's contextual advertising system. Drawing on the vast amounts of data provided by its users and supplying metrics and query capabilities will no doubt prove to be lucrative. Much has been made of Facebook's particularly rich user data — perhaps too much. Although that data is likely to be better structured and therefore easier to leverage, it's not obvious that Facebook will be able to target ads to its users more precisely than, say, Google does within Gmail. Still, it's hard to imagine these ads being anything less than a huge financial success.

The same can't be said for Facebook Pages, which will provide brands with profiles on Facebook. Facebook has already tried this approach with Wal-Mart, and the results were disastrous. Not only did the nominally back-to-school-oriented page fill up with complaints about the retailer's business practices, but — perhaps more tellingly — many users attacked Wal-Mart and Facebook for bringing corporate shilling to their beloved social network. MySpace's brand profiles have met with a similarly lackluster response: An Inconvenient Truth's MySpace page was something of a marketing coup, but once the novelty wore off the practice failed to produce anything of significance. Although other companies will attract less ire than Wal-Mart, it's hard to imagine users being any more keen to engage with them (except, perhaps, for already-elite brands like Apple or Nike).

The final and most interesting prong of Facebook's strategy is Beacon, a system that will allow partner sites to post users' actions back to Facebook. Having your Amazon purchases or Netflix selections displayed in your mini-feed are the sorts of applications that are being hyped. As you might imagine, Beacon carries privacy concerns, as well as worries that the move will result in a further dilution of Facebook's already annoyingly low signal:noise ratio.

But to my mind the biggest unknown is whether the new data will be considered meaningful by consumers. There's no question that endorsement of a product by a peer is the most effective form of advertising available. Beacon is built with the hope that there are many marginal cases in which users would be willing to recommend the products they're consuming, but can't be bothered to take deliberate action to do so. But does purchasing a product necessarily mean a user wants to endorse it? Or do consumers prefer to curate their public purchases, picking and choosing the brands that they want to use to define their online identity?

It's not clear what the answer is, but I think there's reason to be skeptical of any initiative that attempts to automate individual peer recommendation. After all, genuine human enthusiasm is the sole reason why such recommendations are so effective.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

My friend Gareth Branwnyn (who was senior editor at bOING bOING, the zine) is now a book editor at O'Reilly Media. I'm proud that the first book he edited there is called The Best of Make, which contains 75 projects from the first 12 issues of the magazine. Gareth wrote about it for the Provisions Library.

Here's what he had to say:

At the risk of having too many of my Provisions DIY pieces being about me, or flogging my own projects, I’d like to… er flog my latest book project, my first title as an editor for Make: Books. It’s called The Best of MAKE and it’s a collection of 75 DIY projects from the first ten volumes of MAKE magazine. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, MAKE is a magazine created by Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media (the computer book publisher of record) and Mark Frauenfelder (of Boing Boing, former Wired editor). Each issue has a theme (alt.vehicles, home electronics, backyard biology, etc.), news, views, and profiles related to the growing DIY movement, creative reuse and recycling, hardware hacking, and the like. And each issue has a number of projects, from quickie hacks you can do in a few minutes to weekend-long endeavours. For the book, we went through the first ten issues and chose our (and the readers’) favorite projects. Here are a few examples of some of what’s covered in the book:

• How to make a guitar out of a cigar box and an amp housed in a cracker box
• How to turn an analog computer mouse into a light-seeking, obstacle-avoiding robot
• How to run a car on fryer grease
• How to build a soda bottle rocker
• How to create a small wind power generator from a treadmill motor
• How to make a mint-tin headphone amp

  There are also tutorials on getting started in electronics, outfitting a workshop, using microcontrollers, circuit-bending, and other DIY skill sets.

  I’m really proud of this book and think it offers an amazing collection of fun, useful, and educational projects. Reading through the list above, some may sound silly, the kind of projects seen in old Popular Mechanics issues that nobody, maybe not even the author, actually bothered to build. This is not the case with MAKE. These projects are built and re-built to make sure they perform as advertised. I also incorporated any feedback/glitches found from the forums on the makezine.com website into the book, so these are the most trouble-free version of the projects to date.

  If you’re not familiar with MAKE, or haven’t been a subscriber, this collection would be a great way to get up to speed. Okay, I’ll shut up now… (and promise that next week’s column won’t even mention my name).
  

Link

Everything about these 1970s commercials for Planet of the Apes dolls is wonderful, including the warbly soundtrack and use of "Also Sprach Zarusthra" for the score (I guess it goes with all things ape).

Memory Harker says: "Watch for a while; the pay-off is when they start doing the narrative scenarios. Holy Lawgiver, this is ape-tastic!" Link (Via Coudal)